me. Yet the restriction has not been without its advantages. So vast and various is the wealth of English poetry, that picking and choosing is hard work indeed. Poem after poem comes before one, favourites of one's own boyhood, favourites of one's manhood, here a stanza one has not the heart to set aside, there a thought one dare not miss, till one may well cry with Macbeth, 'What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom ?' Representative of English poetry, representative even of the poets whose work it has touched, the book does not profess to be, could not, by very reason of its existence, be. Nor, though I shall be glad to think that there is nothing here that is not after its kind good, may I dare to claim with Mr. Palgrave that my little collection includes nothing beside the best. But the tastes of boys are various in their degree as are the tastes of men, and some of them at least let me hope I have been so fortunate as to hit. My aim has been to let boys see, if they will, for themselves, that poetry is really

Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo's lute,

And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.

And if for love of any good and beautiful thing he may find herein one reader may be moved to turn for further pleasureand pleasure in the things that are beautiful and good is the highest and surest profit-if for such he shall be moved, I say, to turn to the great fountain-heads from which these streams are drawn, I shall feel my pleasant labour has not been in vain.

I should be glad to think this little posy of other men's flowers' may find its way to the hands of other than Eton boys, yet to Eton I have wished to dedicate it in grateful memory of that beautiful place. Despite the inevitable change that everywhere must come when the old order shall have done its appointed work; despite of Public Schools Commissions, of

letters from indignant Patresfamiliæ, of many other things, ordained, no doubt, and salutary, if at the time unpleasing, the memory of Eton must still be nourished with peculiar fondness by all who have ever been under the spell of her enchantments. Those venerable buildings so lovingly touched by Time, those incomparable playing-fields shaded by their immemorial brotherhood of elms, and kissed by the silver-winding' river, will still stand undimmed and unforgotten, when the memory of many a more famous, many a more splendid scene has passed away. No son of Eton need be shamed to record, though never so poorly, his love for that beautiful and kindly mother. To her then I dedicate this little offering, to her and to those whom now she holds under her gentle charge; hoping only that they may receive it with the spirit in which it is made, not as one more contribution to the eternal tale of lessons, not as an unbidden intruder on the lawful pleasures of their play-time, but as a companion and a friend anxious and, I hope, able to stir them

Not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food

For future years.

Cricket and football, the river, the fives-court, and the runningground, are, in their own degrees, a necessary and a wholesome part of education: the hours passed in the playing-fields should go hand in hand with those of pupil-room and classtime if our schools are to be all that they should and can be. Yet sometimes a relaxation from the more tumultuous pleasures of boyhood is not disdained. A rainy holiday, a sprained ankle, or some other of those lesser ills that boy's flesh is heir to, may paint the solitude of his own little room, the ' warm precincts' of a cheerful fire and a Windsor chair in no ungra

cious colours. Then, if haply curiosity, or a love of change, may turn him for a moment from the more stirring society of Scott or Marryatt, Mayne Reid or Ainsworth, to the sober little volume I now offer him; and if some kindlier and deeper feeling may keep it for awhile in his hands, may bring it back to them once and again, my task will be done-it will be done if, in the school that still among its traditions keeps green the memory of 'Poet's Walk,' it has encouraged in one boy a fondness for poetry, and led him to gain some wisdom from this, the best kind of reading.

It remains for me only to acknowledge my obligations to the following gentlemen-to Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Browning, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. William Morris, Sir Francis Doyle, and Mr. Locker, as also the Messrs. Longmans, Blackwood, Smith and Elder, and Macmillan; without whose courtesy my fourth book would have been but a scanty affair indeed. How large a gap the absence of Mr. Tennyson's name must make I am but too conscious; that however arises from circumstances over which none but his publishers have any control.